Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat in Amazon EC2

Don't be afraid of the cloud! Let Canonical and Amazon pick up the tab.

Last year, I wrote an article on how to run Ubuntu 9.10 in the
Amazon Elastic Cloud (LJ, May 2010).
But, the folks over
at Canonical haven't been sitting on their laurels during the past year. They're so proud of the work they've done on their latest release,
10.10 Maverick Meerkat, they're offering a free 55-minute trial of
it in Amazon's EC2 cloud. The best part is you don't need an Amazon
EC2 account or a credit card. The wizards at Canonical have tied this
in to their Launchpad software collaboration platform, so all you need
is an account on launchpad.net to “get your cloud on”.

What you get for your 55 minutes is actually a fairly nice demo
package. Your cloud instance consists of the equivalent of a 1.2GHz
processor, 2GB of RAM, 160GB of disk space, full sudo-enabled root
access and a fast local connection to the Ubuntu mirrors. The Ubuntu
folks even provide a few preconfigured applications from which to choose,
like WordPress, MoinMoin or Drupal 7. The really great part about this
setup is that it renders most of my previous article obsolete—it's
really easy to set up and launch your instance.

Getting Started in the Cloud

Before you log in to the “Ubuntu in the Cloud” Web site, you should generate
a set of SSH keys on the client (or set of clients) you'll use to
administer the cloud instance, and upload those to your account on
launchpad.net. This is a prerequisite, because Amazon EC2 generally
allows SSH access only via SSH keys. If you already have a launchpad.net
account, it's easy to do. Just go to your account page, click on SSH
Keys, then click on the green plus icon to add a new SSH key.
Then, paste your key in the field. If you've never generated any SSH keys
before, there's a great tutorial on the Ubuntu Wiki (see Resources).
If you don't have an account on
launchpad.net, you should. It's where you can file bugs and enhancements
to Ubuntu and other projects, and it's easy to register for one.

Once you've uploaded an SSH key to launchpad.net, point your Web browser
at the “Ubuntu in the Cloud” link (see Resources), and click the
Try Ubuntu 10.10 button. You'll be prompted to enter your launchpad.net
credentials if you're not already signed into Launchpad. Once your
credentials are accepted, you'll see the options for your free EC2
instance. Select what you'd like to try (Base install, WordPress,
MoinMoin or Drupal) and whether to use byobu (a screen-based
terminal wrapper—I highly recommend it). After that, just agree to
the Terms of Service, and click the big orange Launch button to start
your instance. You'll see an Ubuntu logo with a little status indicator
blinking away while the instance is built.

Figure 1. Launching Your EC2 Demo Instance

When the instance is ready for use, you'll see a countdown clock in your
browser with the remaining time and the IP address of your
instance. You can SSH in to your instance by logging in as
“ubuntu@<ip
address>”, or if you selected one of the preloaded software
packages,
like WordPress, the Web page will display a link you can use to
get to the admin interface of your package.

Figure 2. How to Access Your EC2 Demo Instance

Now that your instance is on its feet, you can do anything you'd
do with an Internet-connected Ubuntu server—so long as you are done
within an hour. You can configure it as a Web server, play around with
LDAP, make it a mail server, or even fire up a honeypot (so long as
you're done with it in an hour). Anything you can
apt-get in Ubuntu,
you can install in this server, so play with things like Apache, Squid
or whatever servers you like. This is a full Ubuntu installation in
Amazon's data center, so be sure to test-drive it!

Figure 3. SSH'd to my new instance, with /proc/cpuinfo displayed. Note
byobu at the top of the window.

The preconfigured software is pretty good as well. In this case, when
I provisioned the instance, I selected the WordPress option, and I
was pleasantly surprised to see WordPress ready to go. All I had to do
was click the URL presented by the Web page once the instance was ready
and answer a few WordPress-specific questions like “What do you want
the site name to be?” and “What's the admin password for your WordPress
site?” I literally had posted my first blog post to the instance within
a couple minutes of it being live.

Figure 4. WordPress is live! Easiest installation I've ever done.

As your hour winds down, if you're SSH'd to the instance, you'll get a
“wall” message ten minutes before your hour is up, another when there
are five minutes remaining, and a final message at the one-minute
mark. Once your time is up, the instance “powers off”, and the Amazon
cloud automagically cleans up and deletes your instance, as well as any
data you put there, so make sure you're not putting anything important
there. It truly is a demo service.

As Linux continues to play an ever increasing role in corporate data centers and institutions, ensuring the integrity and protection of these systems must be a priority. With 60% of the world's websites and an increasing share of organization's mission-critical workloads running on Linux, failing to stop malware and other advanced threats on Linux can increasingly impact an organization's reputation and bottom line.

Most companies incorporate backup procedures for critical data, which can be restored quickly if a loss occurs. However, fewer companies are prepared for catastrophic system failures, in which they lose all data, the entire operating system, applications, settings, patches and more, reducing their system(s) to “bare metal.” After all, before data can be restored to a system, there must be a system to restore it to.

In this one hour webinar, learn how to enhance your existing backup strategies for better disaster recovery preparedness using Storix System Backup Administrator (SBAdmin), a highly flexible bare-metal recovery solution for UNIX and Linux systems.